30 June 2011

General Orders No. 9 is a rapturous ode to Georgia and a plaint for paradise lost—for what has been paved over and polluted, poisoned by the dissonance of urban asymmetry. In the first half, first time writer-director Robert Persons traces the state's (and country's?) evolution: "deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road"; the opening monologue describes the geometric patterns found in county planning and the construction of roads, using the kind of language poets usually reserve for celestial bodies. Narrator William Davidson gives soft voice to Persons's historical, philosophical and spiritual ruminations: "here there is a sense of order... not one brick out of true, not one heifer out of pasture." Against this narration, reminiscent of 19th century free verse, Persons parades images of carefully composed and naturally lighted landscapes; it looks like a Malick movie stripped of its narrative pretenses: sun, mists, clouds, trees, fields, roads, fish, farm animals, churches, water towers and small-town storefronts; the flames of a fire, flickering in slow motion. Persons' portrait of a place disregards its people for its topography; the meditative General Orders No. 9 seems to function within cosmological time (for which human life is too ephemeral), where man-made structures resemble ruins and stand amid flowers, lakesides, and ceramic figurines. At least, anyway, until the interstate arrives.

Pixar's recent strategy has been to expand its audience by making movies for and about the new demographics that they wish to attract. Cartoons, especially well-made ones, will always draw kids and parents, but Up got grandparents to the theater, too; Toy Story 3 brought the young-adult millenials (older cousins? siblings?) who had been children themselves back in 1995. But the Cars franchise? It's for kids only; whatever the studio stands to lose in potential ticket sales it makes up for in merchandising. It's basically a toy commercial, just like Transformers.

Six months after the release of the first movie, Disney had already made $1 billion in retail sales. By now, the property has raked in ten times that, in toys and other crap. That should explain how puerile the movie is, from its introduction to the cliches from daddy's action movies to its pat themes about friendship.

17 June 2011

There's virtuosity to admire and gratuitous violence to abhor in Kidnapped (Secuestrados), a punishing home-invasion thriller from Spain. The story begins with a well-off Madrid family that recently moved to a new house in a gated community. They squabble lovingly: mom (Ana Wagener) wants teenage daughter (Manuela Velles) to spend their first night at home with her parents; dad (The Orphanage's Fernando Cayo) thinks she should be allowed to see her friends. If not particularly original, the family feels real; if not exactly relatable, at least identifiable, the key to any such horror movie, whose success depends upon earning the audience's sympathy. Well, get ready for uncalled for causes for sympathy: as apparent cosmic punishment for mom's refusal to let her little girl grow up, the family's house, that elemental representation of safety, is soon violated by invading Eastern Europeans, who come smashing in like Kool-Aid men, without warning, a true-to-life surprise. Mom should have let her daughter go out! While dad is taken to empty the family's bank accounts at an ATM, the women remain at the house with the other two captors, one of whom has a short temper, a few grams of cocaine, and a propensity for sexual assault.

There's a UN parallel here, but only so this very conservative movie can bash that peacekeeper's lily liver. The US Army parallels are much more conspicuous. After all, it's called the Green Lantern Corps, which evokes the Marines, and that each member is a handpicked elite made me think of special forces—Green Berets, for an earlier era, or a Seal Team for the present. Look at who the good guys are in this movie: defense contractors, fighter-plane pilots, even a government scientist (Angela Basset), who in any other movie would be sinisterly conspiratorial, and the senior senator from Louisiana (Tim Robbins), who in any other movie would be conniving and corrupt. And who's the only earth-bound villain? An academic (Peter Sarsgaard)! ...The movie admonishes the cowardice of "assessing the situation" regarding the impending war; was [it] written while Obama was weighing his options in Afghanistan? And when [hero Hal] Jordan finally accepts his lot as a Lantern, he gives a stirring speech to the UN-like elders in which he highlights the threat to Earth—specifically, to America—as being not just "fear" but the fear to fight. We have to bring the fight to them, "to destroy evil wherever it may hide"—particularly in Iraq, maybe? Jordan sounded a lot like Colin Powell ca. 2003 there.

10 June 2011

Legends once preserved a culture's repressed memories. But in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Primitive, an installation now at the New Museum (through July 2), that duty falls to cinema. In eight videos, the Thai master interviews a man who can recall his past lives, observes time-killing teens and then builds a spaceship with them; he watches that spaceship slowly rise and sink (like a hot-air balloon that can't lift off), soldiers shoot peasants, and lightning strike the countryside. Taken together, these videos sketch an impressionist portrait of the Thai village Nabua, the same area in and about which Weerasethakul shot his Palme D'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—where, according to wall text, the Thai military clashed with communist-sympathetic farmers in the 1960s and 70s, resulting in an occupation that sent the local males into hiding. In Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul represented this absent generation with laser-eyed monkey ghosts; in Primitive, he focuses not on them but on the children they left behind—the boys raised in a town without men.

[There's] something elementally conservative here: the bad guys are the military, the good guys are the small-town sheriffs—it's federal vs. local, a "state's rights" kind of thing. But while the movie might promote small government, it also has a levelheaded attitude toward foreign policy. Its sympathy for the "monster," the alien held captive and tortured by the Air Force, seemed like tacit support for Guantanamo detainees, and for The Other in general, as though Abrams were saying you can be nostalgic for an Eisenhower-esque America without being xenophobic. But there's also a parallel between the monster and the freaks n' geeks who make up our gang of little rascals, who are also outsiders (Joe wants to make 8mm zombie movies while his father urges him to go to baseball camp), and perhaps even the filmmakers: the alien feels stuck in a small town; all he wants to do is get the hell out of there, go somewhere lacking in suffocating provincialism, just as the film's budding, pre-adolescent cineastes surely grow up and move to California to get jobs working for Steven Spielberg, just like Abrams did!

Print is dying. But don't stop the presses because it's old news. It's also the subject of Page One, a documentary about media transformation reflexively told through the media desk at the New York Times. An overview of the troubled state of journalism today, the movie sums up arguments anyone with a passing interest in the subject already knows—about the shift in ownership of the means of distribution, about changing advertising models, about buyouts and layoffs, about Julian Assange. The movie is also a convincing if cheerleading argument for the importance of the Times. (In one amazing smackdown, columnist David Carr humiliates a Vice editor following a flippant remark about the paper's Liberia coverage.) With "unprecedented access" to the Times newsroom, director Andrew Rossi captures (and possibly influences) the staffers' dogged professionalism: reporters chasing stories and challenging sources; editors debating newsworthiness during night shifts.

Just like the old X-Men Saturday morning cartoon, the latest prequel in this hit-or-miss franchise uses "mutation" for allegories as broad as competing strands of American ideologies, and as narrow as puberty and sexual preference. You know me: I'm gonna start with the broad. X-Men: First Class is about Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) as young men—before the school, before the wheelchair, before the bald head. I read their coming-of-age as the birth of the political struggle in this country between hawks and doves: Magneto born of Nazi savagery (in a flashback to a 1944 Polish ghetto) like many a conservative American, Xavier born of Westchester affluence like many a munificent liberal. Ethnic minority and privilege—two "mutations," two forms of freakishness that are potential sources of embarrassment or defiant pride for the thoughtful young man.

The most relieving thing about this sequel is that it's not so aligned with Phil (Bradley Cooper)'s point of view. And so even though it has liberal critic-baiting jokes about the size of Asian titties (and child prostitution), I felt pretty indifferent about The Hangover Part II. Must be because even the movie is so indifferent. Its most galling feature must be its nihilism: it's so careful to play both sides of everything. A cello recital is unimpeachably beautiful, but you can also laugh at Zach Galifianakis' thumbs-down review; Buddhist temples are gorgeous, but they're also full of hilariously violent kung-fu monks ("buncha bald assholes"); Thailand is too disgusting for the guys to drink anything but American beer, but "this place is also really paradise"; Chow (Ken Jeong) says "nigga" (funny!), someone calls him a racist (oh, right!).

The characters have a professed respect for intelligence, talent, racial differences and religion—when Alan confesses a lie, Phil is incredulous: "Alan! You swore to god!"—that they don't actually live. It's a conflict between the pussies (represented by Stu) and the badasses (represented by Phil). (Alan is also coded feminine: he calls Doug at night and hangs up, he's always crying.) But the moral of the story is that both sensibilities are equally important, thus the Tyson tattoo on Stu's face, an almost-clever visual representation of this duality (think Two-Face). Really, The Hangover Part II is a centrist story of interdependence—bipartisanship, dare I say? Or, an illustration of the complementary natures of femininity and masculinity. Maybe that's why the movie is so repulsed by homosexuality (accusing someone of it is considered a great insult, as when Alan tells a 16-year-old pre-med student that Doogie Howser grew up to be gay; actually engaging in it is almost enough to make somebody suicidal): because the movie has no faith in man alone. Could there be something pro-woman about this movie after all?